How Product-led Organisations Do Things Differently

Jose Manuel Villanueva López, Marcus Andrews, Snjezana Momic, Panagiotis Liaros at How Product-Led Organisations Do Things Differently. Video: https://youtu.be/_bbjDaT7Tyc

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

Introducing the panel

[00:00:00] Marcus: Hello everyone. Thank you for the introduction. Yeah, excited to chat. We've got a really good panel today. UXDX is cool. I agree with you that when you're talking about something like becoming product-led, you really need lots of people across the organization. It can't just be something that's done by one team like product, and that's often the case, that people try and do that. So we've got a very cool cross-functional panel, lots of different representation on the panel today.

[00:00:29] Marcus: I will just go down the list in the slide here. We've got Panos, who's a senior product manager from Philips. Panos, hello. We have Robbie, who's the head of growth at Fluidly. We have Snjezana, who's a product director at Oxygen. And Jose, who's a design lead at ThoughtWorks. So thank you all for being here. Jose, you are very festive. If you were American, I would say, "Oh, you're getting ready for Thanksgiving with your festive Thanksgiving flannel on." So thanks for doing that.

[00:01:02] Jose: I'm very close to the US culture, for sure.

[00:01:08] Marcus: Perfect, perfect. Awesome. Well, thank you guys for being here. I'm really, really excited to chat. I think it's awesome to do, because it really is kind of rare that you get different people from all over the organization to talk about one topic like this, and you all have different points of view and different ideas to share. So that's what we're going to get into today.

Why becoming product-led matters

[00:01:25] Marcus: I'm going to tee it up a little bit. I think the purpose of today — so I'm Marcus Andrews, director of product marketing at Pendo — the purpose of today is to talk less about why becoming a product-led organization matters and is important, and talk more about unpacking the things that product-led companies do differently, or that you do in your role when you're thinking about becoming product-led, in your product-led journey.

[00:01:51] Marcus: Why this is important, I will start there though. The way people, the world, is changing, and especially the way that people buy new products and software products, really anything, is dramatically different than any time it's been before in the world. What's going on with people is that people expect very little friction in the things that they buy and the tools that they buy, their buying experience. They expect great design, great UX. People understand what good is and they expect it. People have less of a desire to talk to humans, whether that's to get support or to upgrade or to buy. And in general, I think people are a lot smarter and a lot more technically savvy than they've ever been.

[00:02:34] Marcus: And all this coming together is forcing companies to adapt and change and do things differently. So you see a lot of companies hiring product teams, investing in product, investing in user research, UX, product design, to build better customer experiences. You see companies rolling out product-led growth and in-app support to deliver that experience that people want. And you see companies really changing the way they market and the way that they sell, and introducing free products and doing all these things.

[00:03:09] Marcus: The companies that nail this and really get this right and are doing a great job of it are what Pendo, what we call product-led organizations. As you saw, that book that the UXDX team was talking about earlier that Todd, our CEO, wrote is really all about that: companies like Zoom and Slack and Zendesk and Atlassian, and they've really transformed their business around their product, and it's created this really, really good customer experience.

[00:03:32] Marcus: So I think a lot of people believe in this. A lot of people probably watching our panel, Pendo, we're all kind of going through this transformation, trying to get better at becoming a product-led company. Pendo's definitely doing it even though we evangelize for it. We only introduced a free product, I think, in the last year. We really have gone all in on it. So everybody's sort of in pieces of this journey, and that's what we're going to talk about today so that you can learn from these people. We're going to have lots of time. We're going to have a panel discussion and then I think we'll have some time to open it up to the audience too. You can put stuff in the chat and we will check it out and we will answer it.

What product-led means: purpose, checks and balances, living prototype

[00:04:11] Marcus: But why don't we start there, and Jose, because you are so festive and ready for this panel, why don't we start with you? What does it mean to be product-led? What does that mean to you when you think about being product-led? How do you define it? What's your answer to what that means?

[00:04:28] Jose: Yeah, to me it definitely means three things. The first is that everybody on the team understands what the purpose of the product that we are trying to build is. And that goes back to a very basic question, but a very important one, which is basically: how is our product improving the life of the people that are using this product? It seems like a very basic question, but it's the one that we go back and refer to in order to understand the value that we are bringing through our product. So that's the first one.

[00:05:01] Jose: The second, I think through a product approach what we're trying to do is to create a system of checks and balances between what the business thinks is important, what we hear from our users, and then also what is feasible from a technical approach. We all have to be on the same page and together discussing those things in order to understand what is the thing that brings the maximum value with the lower effort, so we don't spend an entire year of planning and then we just try to release something. So that's super important.

[00:05:35] Jose: This also comes with another layer, which is trying to shift the mindset of our teams into thinking more critically, and that goes back again to a very basic question. It's: is what we're trying to build being solved with a digital product, or actually what we need to do is design a service, or maybe it's a mix of both? Or actually what we're asked to do is to drive a user behavioral change. And if so, is a digital product the best solution for that? So again, those are questions that we go back and we use over and over.

[00:06:08] Jose: And finally, I think it's also very important, we try to think about our product as the living prototype. What do I mean with that? That the product that we release is the common destination for our stakeholders, for our users and for our technical teams to understand how the product works. This is super important, because if we think that our product is a living prototype, then we can start doing little test things around in the actual experience. So this is not about changing everything at once, but doing those incremental changes that we can do right on the product that we release, and seeing the meaningful change that it has created in our users. So these three things.

[00:06:55] Marcus: Great advice. And tell us quickly what you look after at ThoughtWorks. You're leading design, right? Or tell me a little bit more about that.

[00:07:03] Jose: Yeah, basically what I'm doing at ThoughtWorks right now — ThoughtWorks is a technical consultancy, for those who don't know. So actually ThoughtWorks is my client as well. I'm working inside of the organization to drive cultural change. We're trying to bring back the culture of learning at the center of the organization, because we are scaling a lot and somehow that culture has been diluted over the years, and we're going to be scaling up to 30,000 employees in such a short amount of time that we need to bring back this culture.

[00:07:31] Jose: So what we're doing is that of course we are using digital products to bring us together into that approach, but at the same time, we were not that conscious, but we were actually building an entire service that connects together growth, performance, learning and actually staffing right now, because as a consultancy we staff people on projects. So all of that is kind of like a service that we are designing, but of course with a digital experience at the core. So we work very closely with teams of the different disciplines at ThoughtWorks, you name it, finance, head of people, recruitment, etc.

Data and continuous discovery

[00:08:05] Marcus: Awesome. Cool, very, very interesting take and good examples. Panos, you're in product, right? So what does it mean to you? Stick it in the same universe. What does being product-led mean to you, and maybe why is it important? What's the benefit of it?

[00:08:22] Panos: Yeah, I had similar points to Jose, so I will steer a bit, maybe complement. To me it's really a lot on being data-driven as well. If you don't measure it, you don't love it, some people say. So you really have to have your evidence, your metrics, and iterate on this, see how things are going. Are the new features I'm releasing being adopted? Do they bring more traffic? Do they contribute towards our vision, our mission? If yes, good, maybe we do more of these. If no, fine, fine as well, we kill this feature, we iterate, and we keep going. So that's one thing for me: really know your metrics and have your data in place.

[00:09:18] Panos: The other thing I have in mind, for product-driven companies it's a lot about engaging in continuous discovery. And what that will mean for me is to really be in touch with your customer, never drop the ball on this game. Weekly, or as often as it's possible for your team, have some discovery sessions with the customer, and ask on examples like how will you use this. How can I best say it? Guide your customers on some use cases you are interested in building, and then the customer will very well set examples for you and tell you what can be useful or not on solutions you are thinking of.

[00:10:19] Panos: And this will be for me the two biggest things actually: data and customer interaction. Because with these two in mind, you can be quite successful actually.

Product-led as a go-to-market strategy

[00:10:32] Marcus: Absolutely. Snjezana, why don't we jump over to you? Tell us a little bit about what you do, and then maybe what being product-led means to you, how you're putting it to use.

[00:10:44] Snjezana: Yeah, so I'm product director at Oxygen, and we are essentially a consumer start-up. I think, Marcus, what you mentioned at the beginning, this generation is really the one that is really tech-savvy, digital native. They grew up with their phones, and we are designing the product for them. So there's no patience in terms of waiting to understand what the value of the product is. They make a decision in like 10 seconds about the product when they have it in their hands, in the phone. So that's an additional trend, a really important one, why we are today where we are and why the product-led model is really successful for companies.

[00:11:30] Snjezana: So to me, product-led, I always go back to the definition, because it's a really big topic, so sometimes you need to go back to the essentials. And for me it's essentially a go-to-market strategy where your product is in the center, and you're leveraging your product for the acquisition, activation, retention and expansion of your business. So with that said, this results in all your teams throughout the organization aligning around product and leveraging that product to create the seamless customer experience, but also to achieve their own outcomes as teams.

[00:12:18] Snjezana: So as a result of that, you end up with putting the user in the driver's seat. You give them freemium or a free trial to test it out. Your marketing is using the product as a lead magnet, let's say, to generate a lead. Your sales team is using them to qualify the prospect, because the people are coming in and you're essentially looking at a wider top of the funnel. You get more people in, they try on their own, and then you have somebody who is more interested in the product than before. So I guess it's a big shift, big change, and there's a lot of responsibility on the product, because I would say the product is in the center.

Putting the user in the driver's seat at a start-up

[00:13:09] Marcus: Absolutely. Yeah. And I think you describe it well too, because I do think most businesses can benefit from taking a product-led approach, but if you have an audience that, like you, maybe is Gen Z, that's even more advanced and sophisticated with technology or their expectations than other audiences, there's really no other option. Is there a specific place where you think you've gained a competitive advantage? Has this approach helped you? Is there a way you've clearly benefited from doing this?

[00:13:45] Snjezana: So from the start we kind of enabled them to try the product. So we didn't ask even for the sign-up or anything else, for any data. We just said, okay, there you go, it's your decision. Of course you need to be really, really careful with that, but essentially that was our go-to strategy for the market. Put them in the driver's seat. Really try to understand what they are trying to get out of the product, what is the value of the product that we are giving them back, and learn on that and update the product as we go.

[00:14:25] Marcus: Now, was that hard internally? Was that a tough decision to make? Did you have to fight any battles or have discussions about it?

[00:14:33] Snjezana: Internally? Really, no. We started because we are a start-up, like two years old, so we started like that. We understood the Gen Zs are very pragmatic. They understand the financials. They know how to measure time versus value in their own life. So we understood the customer really well and what they are expecting, and then we just basically designed from there. We are a small team so we have very limited resources, and we said virality is our way to go. We need to achieve it to survive. And we didn't have a big sales team or a big marketing budget. So everything is limited. So you really want those growth loops in, and we were just focusing on how to get there, how to put it in front of customers.

[00:15:30] Marcus: Yeah, absolutely. And I think a lot of start-ups and companies are taking that same approach, because it's almost more risky to invest in a big sales and marketing machine. That is a risk, and maybe it feels risky doing something like that where you're giving people access for free and you're requesting less data up front, but it's kind of less risky in a way too, because you're not spending so much money on a big sales and marketing machine.

Growth loops rather than the funnel

[00:15:56] Marcus: All right, Robbie, tell us a little bit about what you do, and what product-led means to you, maybe how you're putting it to use at Fluidly.

[00:16:05] Robbie: Yeah, so I'm the head of growth at Fluidly, which kind of gives me a slightly different take, which is: growth is often about — or product, traditionally, just to give a brief definition — product is often more about creating that feature that has value, and then growth is about driving users towards that and making sure they can experience the actual value. Of course everyone in a start-up or a tech company should be focused on growth, but that's a distinction that's hopefully useful.

[00:16:33] Robbie: And I thought it was interesting, that was a great definition of what product-led is. I guess it's also useful to think about what it is not. I think you've touched on that a little bit, Marcus, which is it's not paid marketing, that kind of thing, and it's not having a big sales team. And I think maybe more controversially, it's binning the funnel. So the acquisition, activation, retention, revenue, referral, the AARRR model. It's focusing instead on loops, which was also just mentioned. So thinking about your user, how they get value from the product, how they might share or invite others to then experience that value, which then can create the mecca of what we're all trying to create, which is organic growth rather than the stuff that we have to pay for.

[00:17:17] Robbie: And so the classic breakout for that might be Teams during the pandemic, and obviously Slack before it, which is still a B2B product, but it's driving involvement from other users. And that's how I think about product-led growth, which is how can you create that user value sharing loop that's actually going to drive really organic growth.

[00:17:41] Robbie: And that's how we think about it at Fluidly, where we provide cash flow management software for accountants and SMEs. And a lot of this is about providing a really delightful, interesting experience for our accountants that drives conversations with their clients. That means they share it both with their clients and also with their colleagues as well. And that's what we spend a lot of time focusing on, and it's really hard as well, it's worth noting, in a time-constrained world.

[00:18:06] Robbie: I think the only final thing I might add quickly, and you might have more questions, is also that this is not for everyone, around product-led growth. I used to work at Humu, another start-up, and that was focused on enterprise sales, and actually that was the right strategy for that product. And you still have to have all these product aspects and be thinking carefully about product, but you want a big sales team. And so you have to combine these.

[00:18:33] Robbie: I guess one of the stories I might end on is actually TikTok, maybe another Zoomer or Gen Z kind of product as well. You might think of TikTok as a product-led model, but actually, somewhat counterintuitively, it's also a paid model. The way they drove a lot of their early network effects, a lot of their users, is actually from a huge marketing spend targeted at where Gen Z hangs out on the internet. And so I think this is what you should think about as product teams, which is how do you mold the product-led with the other kinds of tools in your arsenal as well.

[00:19:09] Marcus: Yeah, it's a great point to end on. I think it's not either/or necessarily. But I do think there's a lot of companies that can benefit from just this change in thinking, because you do want to shift and match how people buy and what they expect. But yes, things can become very powerful if you are able to combine the two. Let's say you have an enterprise product that requires an enterprise sales motion, but you also have a free version that can get people caught up and up to speed and then help the sales team. And that's what Slack's model is, right, where everybody is using Slack for free probably at some point, but they have sales teams of course, because they sell massive deals to big companies. So you do want people to work on that, and there's some really, really good things that happen with that.

The hard parts: staying customer-centric and cross-functional

[00:20:03] Marcus: Why don't we stay with you for a second? Tell us — I'm curious about some of the challenges you've had, so you can take that wherever you want. Anything that is particularly hard about product growth for you. But also I'm curious about how you work with product. What are some of the things you do cross-functionally? I don't know if you have any examples of challenges there, but one thing with growth teams, I think it's tough because you do have to work with product and get product to build growth loops for you and stuff. How does that happen?

[00:20:32] Robbie: Yeah. I guess maybe we'll start there. Firstly, I guess the biggest challenge, what is really hard, and I think we've touched on it already, is that absolute laser focus on being customer and user centric is actually really hard, and I don't think many people admit it. You see in every enterprise's marketing these days, they're all customer first, customer centric, it's all about the customer. But actually it's very easy to ship a product and then basically admire it yourself internally, and kind of forget to go look at, are the users actually enjoying it? Do they like it? And is it starting to create some of those loops?

[00:21:13] Robbie: And definitely in my experience, that is one of the biggest challenges around this area. So definitely we're often shipping products, we're speaking to users, but then really being disciplined about going back and understanding, was this just a tactical increase because it was a novelty feature, or is it something that's actually sustainable and driving true value and some kind of loop as well? And so we spend a lot of time making sure we have the systems in place to be like, okay, are we actually going back and understanding what's happening with our customers? Was this a small spike or is it actually a sustainable increase?

[00:21:53] Robbie: And then I think on the second point, cross-functional collaboration, that's actually going to be my second biggest, hardest thing, because it is one of those big difficult things. I used to be a management consultant back in the day, before going into product and growth, and often the management consultant has control of the full project. Basically you produce the slides, you speak to the client, you do everything. That is totally different in technology in general, and also in growth and product, which is totally cross-functional. And I think that is what product-led to me also means. It means you have a team — for instance, in our case it has marketing on it, it has designers on it, it has devs and engineers on it — and it's actually moving together. That actually produces the gains, but that can be hard.

[00:22:38] Robbie: So sometimes growth comes in, we change a few things and we do it as an experiment, and then we might accidentally mess things up as well as a result, in the actual core app or the core product experience. So you do have to have some SLAs with the rest of the team. So one of the SLAs we have is, if we break it we fix it, in growth, as an example. But then also we have different SLAs with our design team as well. So for instance, we might say actually we need faster turnarounds, because we're trying to experiment a bit more and understand what's going on with users, than for a classic feature. So when growth comes to you with a request, we actually have a different kind of feedback cycle. So it's important, you have to be cross-functional, collaborative, they're the core skill set, but also think about what you're trying to do, and maybe you have to put in different team norms or SLAs that sit around it.

[00:23:32] Marcus: Yeah, great points, great points. I 100% agree that if you're going to go product-led you have to be able to be good at collaborating. You're very, very right, because that is also hard. Collaboration is tough. It's much easier to sit in your silo and do your own thing. But if you're going to go product-led you really do have to have all your teams working together. And I'm a product marketing manager, director of product marketing, we're just a very cross-functional role, that's what we're designed to do, and most product managers are too.

Getting feedback inside your own organization

[00:24:03] Marcus: And then also your point on being customer focused: easier said than done. Jose, why don't we go back to you? You talked a little bit about the customer. How do you get customer feedback? How do you stay in touch with the customer and design? Is this something that you have systems to do? Are you just talking to people? How do you approach it?

[00:24:23] Jose: Yeah, our customers, so to speak, are the employees in the organization, which is kind of a bigger problem because you cannot live and breathe those day-to-day challenges. So I have to say up front that working for your organization you have to be super aware of the own biases that you bring to the table, because you are ingrained in the organization. But that also gives you a nice edge, because you are exposed to conversations between stakeholders and between employees that otherwise you might not be able to. Again, it's a consultancy, so chances are that we are sent to clients and clients share partial information with us when we try to solve their challenges, but I'm ingrained in the organization.

[00:25:11] Jose: So the way for me to approach the challenges is by of course approaching my fellow workers and going there and having interviews, but also observing. Something that is harder nowadays because we are all working in remote settings. So there's less information that we are getting from the day-to-day interaction. So that's also something that we have to consider in product design today, that we are missing part of this observation, this way for us to emerge issues by just observing the day-to-day interactions. That's something that we are losing.

[00:25:49] Jose: But with that said, I try to run interviews. And when I say users, actually our users are not just the employees but also the operational employees. So I'm talking about people who work in admin, in HR, in global mobility. All those are users of our systems as well. And if we want to incorporate or to enhance the culture of feedback in the organization, then we have to involve everybody in the organization, even the 5% who work on the operational side. So interviews, talking to stakeholders.

[00:26:23] Jose: And then I think, which is also one of the challenges, is to make sure that we can find time to bring some of those representatives together in the same space to discuss some of these issues, some of these findings, and to co-create the solution. So one of the challenges in products is definitely to carve out that time. Stakeholders are super busy. Our employees are super busy as well, because they are supposed to be 100% consulting for our clients. So carving out that time to sit together and listen to each other in order to break the silos, to understand the challenges, to create that shared understanding, is something that I like to do.

[00:27:01] Jose: So there's two things that I always try to do. One is having a shared understanding about the issues, and for that we have to bring the voices of the different users or employees in the organization. And the other is having universal alignment, and that's more for the product team and with the stakeholders: what is the thing that we're going to be starting to do? Because people have plans. Everybody thinks something different about where to start first. Okay, how can we get them to that universal alignment into, this is the place that we have to start first?

[00:27:33] Jose: There's no way but discussing and discussing and letting it sit and discussing again, and trying to consent to a potential approach. So this is not about voting on what is the best way to start. It's more about consenting, understanding why some people are saying that this is the best way to go. Let us start there, and then let's learn from that. That's how you get people into consenting rather than just misaligning on something, or being mad because my solution is not the one that is going to be done.

[00:28:10] Marcus: Yeah, that's good. There's a lot in there. I think knowing your own biases and building a culture of feedback are two really, really important points. Taking the time to get everybody in the same room. And then also, like you said, a lot of the times you have meetings and people, I think, are too ready to jump into solutions or try to take action out of them. But sometimes you just have to have the conversation and then let it digest and have people think about it, and then have the conversation again, and then have it again. And eventually you're going to get there. It takes more time that way. But I think if you're always talking about things that maybe you're a few years out from, or big issues that don't have an easy solution, you can solve them that way, by talking about them. So, love that point.

Alignment, process and the premortem

[00:28:52] Marcus: Panos, how about collaboration? You're in product management, right? I imagine it's a pretty cross-functional role. What happens when you're collaborating well across different teams? What happens when things aren't going as expected? Help us unpack that one a little bit.

[00:29:13] Panos: Yeah, so you want the happy scenario, right?

[00:29:16] Marcus: Give them both to us. Hey, if you want to share what happens when things don't go well in collaboration, why does it happen that way? What happens when it is working? I think everybody experiences both sides of that coin.

[00:29:32] Panos: Yeah, no, a very good question. I believe in general, well, except if there is some very dysfunctional organization, in most cases everyone works for the same team, same goal, same bonuses, same product, so everyone wants to collaborate. So in essence, if the processes and the mindsets are in the right way, then things can go fast. I believe that's what the main differentiation is there, to me, like your time to market. When everything runs like a really well set up machine, let's say, you can really see that, as well as happiness in the team is higher, people can appreciate each other, so it's better, there is less friction, because everyone knows the process.

[00:30:25] Panos: And the process can be whatever works for a team. There is not a silver bullet, as Jose says. It's kind of a consent, like what works for us, what will make the best and most valuable outcome for our team. Of course you can use scrum frameworks or any agile framework you want. Still, as was mentioned before in the conversation, it's all about changing habits too. Or as Snjezana was saying, if you're maybe a new company, you don't have much legacy, you can hit the ground running with some kind of digital native. But if you're coming from backgrounds where your company is 150 years old or so, then there is some history and different ways of working there, and that might be things that will slow you down.

[00:31:34] Panos: But yeah, more to your point, and to conclude my answer, I do believe that the magic happens when the team is aligned on how things are expected to work, and then you will see it in your time to market.

[00:31:54] Robbie: Could I suggest a little hack that I think product-led organizations normally will use? So this is probably not a surprise to most people, but it does improve your productivity and the collaboration significantly. Most people run post-mortems or retrospectives after projects, where they go, oh wow, why did all those things go wrong? And the slight hack is a premortem. So before the project gets underway, you get everyone who's going to be involved and touched by the project — customer success, design, all kinds of stakeholders — in the one room, and you walk through the project.

[00:32:33] Robbie: You walk through the user journeys, whatever it is that you've prepared, and you say, imagine it's a year from now, the CEO's on the front steps, the cameras are flashing and the reporters are saying, why did this go so horribly, horribly wrong? What are the things that are going to come up when they say that? And this is a really nice way both to bring everyone into the tent, but also to identify things which you never would have thought were a problem. Maybe there's someone in IT, like an obscure IT department, who says, oh, actually, if you join those two systems together, something will explode. So these are the things that are really useful and important, and it's just a little hack. If you take one thing away from today, maybe run more premortems.

[00:33:16] Marcus: Great advice. Yes, I love that. It's a good idea. And the two pieces I took away from that, Panos, are 100% alignment. There's a thing that Dharmesh at HubSpot wrote about, advice that he got from Elon Musk, where he talks about how every person inside of a company is a vector, and if you're all pointed in different directions, you're pushing against each other. Alignment is so important. And the cool thing about what you're talking about is that when you have alignment then you can add speed on top of that, and you can really get moving. And that's when things, I think, are fun, everybody loves that, when things are just clicking and it's fun and you're moving fast.

[00:33:54] Marcus: And another good point you made, which I love, is that sometimes if you have a scaling tech company, for instance, there's always people who can come in with a lot of process or specific ways of doing things. And I think what you're saying is the process is whatever works. You can have a process, but at the end of the day, if you're all trying to achieve the same goal, it doesn't matter exactly how you get it done. The process can be having flexibility around your process, and the process being however it works. And if there's different teams that operate in slightly different ways, that's okay.

[00:34:28] Marcus: All right. We have plenty more questions. There's four people, so we could talk for a longer time. UXDX team, do we have any good audience questions that we want to toss in here?

[00:34:49] Host: I don't see any in the chat. Not at the moment, but if anybody has any questions, put them in and we'll get them over to the team.

What we learned the hard way

[00:35:00] Marcus: All right, now's your time, listeners. Put your questions in if you've got any good questions. This panel is really interesting to me because it is achieving what I was kind of hoping: we just have lots of different perspectives from different folks. So all right, let's go a little rapid fire here. Now that we're coming to a close: you guys have all been in product organizations, you believe in product-led, you're doing this, you're living this. What's something you had to learn the hard way? A mistake that you made that listeners can figure out, so they don't have to make that same mistake. Since Snjezana, we could start with you if you're ready. What's something you had to learn the hard way, or a mistake you made that people will benefit from?

[00:35:42] Snjezana: Yeah, that's a great question. So I have two examples. The first one is not that much from a mistake, but maybe throughout the experience you just get to understand this and start really realizing that your users are not just focusing on functional aspects of your product, but they're also focusing on emotional and social, like how they're going to be perceived when they use your product, or how they're going to feel, or they don't want to feel, with your product. And that was a really important aspect for me to realize and always keep in mind, because your users are coming with a use case in mind, and you really want to help them to achieve their desired outcome, isn't it?

[00:36:36] Snjezana: So I just love the example of — I'm advising B2B start-ups as well, so I just love to say to them, if you have a live chat and you're building a live chat, what you can say to your users is that you're basically building a web or mobile support tool. But on the other side, you can also position it that it's actually a way for your customer to improve their customer acquisition. So that's a shift, and that's actually a big realization for me, and just keeping this always in the back of my head.

[00:37:16] Snjezana: The second example, and this is from a really painful experience, is that as a start-up you really juggle lots of balls in the air at the same time. You really need to think about the product, about marketing, how you're going to place it, and your messaging and positioning. And you just don't want to leave your onboarding for the end. So if you only focus on your features at first and leave the onboarding, which essentially in product-led, and in our case, was the major acquisition model — if they like the product they're going to sign up, they're going to keep using it. So you really don't want to leave it as an afterthought.

[00:38:01] Snjezana: You really want to look into what you need to do to tick the boxes for the educational side of your product, but also what you need to do in the product to make them feel welcome and say hello. Welcome emails, tool tips, all that stuff to point them, product tours, whatever, just to help them out. Whatever the use case is in their mind, help them out to achieve that in the shortest time possible.

[00:38:35] Marcus: Yeah, I love that. And I love engineers, no offense to engineering, we should have had an engineer on this panel, but when engineers are the only ones who can solve these problems, I think sometimes they look at it through that lens of, okay, this is the functional job that the product needs to solve, and they're thinking less about, how does this make the user feel, or can we build in a moment of delight here, or what if we onboard people in this way? Are people going to understand this? Can we add in a tool tip that's written in some fun language that makes them feel like they're included, or whatever it is? And I think that is a huge element of a good user experience and a great product experience, great customer experience. That's a great point.

[00:39:22] Robbie: Two great things on that, in short. So one is empty states. You really have the possibility to make it fun. If everything is empty — also loading screens, you can make them fun as well. They can be a place of delight.

[00:39:39] Marcus: Yeah, totally right. And B2B software can be fun too. It doesn't have to be boring and gray. You can do funny things with loading screens.

Measurement, evidence and the aha moment

[00:39:51] Marcus: Panos, how about you? Anything that you learned the hard way that you want to share with folks?

[00:39:59] Panos: I was thinking. I guess a typical example is sometimes you build features that are not adopted, or they were not very well thought through to their core. And that's why I started with, if you don't measure it, you don't love it. As well, you have to have evidence for what you'd like to build. Maybe even you had some user discussions to gather requirements or to understand the problem better. But even though, there is a lot of bias in the stories of the users. So you really need some extra backup, like data from wherever you can find it, that can help you really make a coherent story. So maybe to scrutinize my stories more: just qualitative input may not be enough sometimes. Look for more evidence.

[00:41:11] Marcus: Yes, that's a great point, and you need both. You need qualitative and you need quantitative input. But I think for the most part a lot of product teams still rely on gut feel and intuition, and that can get you started when you're a small company. You can make some good guesses, if you're a good PM. But I think at any amount of scale, size of growth, you've got to layer in data, you've got to become more data-driven, and not just in choosing the right features but also in design and growth and all that stuff.

[00:41:43] Marcus: All right, Robbie, how about you? Anything you learned the hard way that you can share with people?

[00:41:51] Robbie: I think it's an obvious point, but one that we should always remind ourselves of, which is just make things as easy and delightful if you can as possible for your customers. And this is, you know, at Fluidly we've made this great forecasting for your cash flow. It's pioneering in the market, it's a new category, it's a very exciting tool for accountants and SMEs, but it takes a little bit of work to set up. And so if you focus too much on that habit moment, which is at the very end of, hey, you should be using this to have monthly discussions with your clients, or a monthly check-in on your cash flow, and you forget the aha moment, like, oh, I see the value, and all those little setup moments, to the earlier point as well, then you're going to get in real trouble.

[00:42:42] Robbie: So don't just think about that end of the line aspect of, wow, we've created this new thing that people will just use because it's so amazing. Think about your customer, how easy is it, how delightful is it? And think about that setup and aha moment, which is that moment of delight, that moment of value that people see, and then how that leads to the habit moment. I think if you can always remember that, then you'll be better placed.

[00:43:11] Marcus: I love that. And that's the right conversation for product teams, and growth teams and everybody, to start having around product-led organizations. It's not just, yeah, we're going to build the right stuff, but also, how can we increase time to value? How can we make sure that the product is sticky, that people are coming back, that they're doing the things that we want them to, we're measuring the things and we understand what brings value, and then how can we push more people to do it? That's when things get really, really interesting.

[00:43:40] Marcus: And I love, we have this thing called core events at Pendo, and so we're talking to our PMs a lot about it, and it's trying to understand in every product, there's lots of things you can measure, but what are the really important aha moments, or things that we know we want people to do, because that is either a sign that they're getting a lot of value out of it or that they're successful with it? So I think starting to think like that is real smart for folks.

Building a feedback culture

[00:44:04] Marcus: We have a question, I think this is a good one for you, Jose. There's a question coming from the audience: tell us about building a feedback culture. How do you encourage your teams to go for that? Anything you can do, influence or bring to the company that helps build that culture of feedback?

[00:44:26] Jose: Wow. It's kind of like the million-dollar question, and one of the questions that we are continuing to learn on. It's so funny because one thing that I can share as a learning is that everybody talks nowadays about feedback, but how many people have been formally trained into what good feedback looks like? It's very unlikely that our generation got to learn that in college, so you can either just read books on that or you read blogs. It's a world right now that has a lot to unpack. But not everyone understands what good feedback looks like.

[00:45:06] Jose: And even something that is very sensitive: whether feedback should be private or made public to the organization. And whether feedback is about how am I doing, or how am I doing against the expectations of the project. So feedback has so many layers. There's a lot of academic research that has been done, but I would challenge if anyone has the right answer right now to say how this looks like in a corporate environment or in an organizational environment.

[00:45:37] Jose: So the thing that we are doing at ThoughtWorks is precisely doing that research. We have academic knowledge on that. There's a lot of papers that have been written on how good feedback looks like, and even more important, once you are provided with feedback, what do you do with that feedback? Should I take it all? Should I accept it partially? Should I just say no and feel confident that I should not do that?

[00:46:01] Jose: So we have been doing a lot of research, and then also asking ourselves the question of what is our vision, our ThoughtWorks vision, for feedback. What's that in our DNA, what's the vision, how has it worked before? One thing is for sure, and we heard from a lot of employees, and that's actually one of the main reasons why sometimes people decide to leave, to be totally honest, is that people feel like they don't get enough feedback, or the feedback that they get is trying to be so politically correct and so in the safe space that it doesn't bring them value. And sometimes feedback comes from people that they don't work with day-to-day.

[00:46:41] Jose: So how do you improve that? It's definitely about role modeling, about pedagogy, about showing examples. We do a lot of role play on that inside of the organization as well, for two people trying to do, I'm that person and you are that person and I'm going to provide you feedback based on that fictional scenario, because we don't want to bring people into the day-to-day case and being exposed. But then a very interesting question is, how can a digital product analyze feedback that is internal to an organization, and how much of that feedback should operational folks be able to consume in order to understand how is this person doing against expectations in the organization? So basically I don't have a definitive answer. We are learning a lot from that. I hope that I can share more in the future.

[00:47:36] Robbie: I have a little hack. Sorry, I have lots of hacks, my background is in behavioral science. If you want to get — and this doesn't answer any of your structural problems with feedback, which I totally agree with, Jose — but if you as an individual want to get more constructive feedback from people, just change one thing about how you ask the question, which is instead of asking for feedback, ask for advice. What advice would you give me? And that is a very different word, and it gives you much more constructive feedback over time. So try it out.

[00:48:10] Marcus: I love that. And the point you make around — feedback is a gift for sure, and I think it's important, but we talk about it that way and we talk less about what the details of it are. Because you can get bad feedback. Not all feedback is good. You can have very meaningless feedback that you get and that you shouldn't take. So, to get into your question, taking the time, giving good feedback is a skill too, I think. You have to be able to really understand the person and what they're doing and the project before you can give good feedback. If you just fly in and you see something and you don't like it and you say that you don't like it, you're not helping anybody really.

[00:48:53] Marcus: So I love it. And good feedback, especially with creatives, if it's a designer or somebody's writing, the feedback could offend them or be hard to take or whatever. And in my own writing, it's been hard for me to take some feedback, but also, when you get really good feedback, it can really make something that was good great. So there's a lot of good points in there. We are over time now, but I just want to thank you guys all. This is really, really fun for me. I feel like I learned a lot. So Jose, Panos, Robbie, Snjezana, nice to meet you guys, and thank you so much for making some time.